The Poetry of Antonio Machado: Changing the Landscape

This study offers a reappraisal of the contribution of the poet Antonio Machado to Modernism, seeking to open up new perspectives for the interpretation of his poetry, and includes for the first time a comparative analysis of Machado’s translators into English. While the book is attentive to areas of recent critical debate, the argument keeps Machado’s poems to the fore, with new detailed readings of many of his most significant poems. The reader will find that the structure of this book also allows for a separate exploration of each of Machado’s main poetic tendencies. One associated with the Symbolist poetics is considered in Chapter I dealing with those early poems where the sound of water acquires a rich symbolic meaning. An emphasis on the visual imagination is more prevalent in the material studied in chapters II and III with a focus on the natural landscape, while the more conceptual and intellectual strand occupies Chapter IV. Every individual chapter begins with a brief introduction to the theoretical ground related to the specific discussion (on gender, space-place, the sublime, and translation, respectively), and a survey of the cultural discourses which situate the material under analysis in the original historical contexts.